Cloud Rat’s New Album Is A Gem Of Pure Bile

Exclusive: Stream the grindcore blowtorch of Cloud Rat’s Pollinator before its release this Friday.

In a couple of key ways, Cloud Rat are what every grindcore band should be. Their music is inexhaustible, spasming through elaborate rackets of heaving riffs, spit-flecked vocals, and berserk percussion without ever slowing down. At the same time, there’s an atmospheric creep to their music that gives it a hard menace, adding that pinch of heavy metal darkness to what could easily just be a lot of noise and sweat. In this way, the Michigan three-piece give listeners both sides of what they want from furious music: the tooth-grinding rancor and the hand-kneading darkness, indivisible.

Cloud Rat’s latest, Pollinator, bursts at the seams with these two attributes. From the opening loom of Losing Weight, through the driven yearning of Al Di La, and straight into the haunting closer of Perla, the album is a startling mixture of atmosphere and sheer velocity. But its variation in tone and attitude from song to song also displays the band’s maturation, setting them apart from the average scabby grind collective with its sense of confidence and emotional intelligence.

According to guitarist Rorik Brooks, “Pollinator is our most complete and accomplished work yet. It is the quintessence of everything we’ve tried to say and do before, and it’s kind of fitting that we are coming up on a decade of being a band together.”